Is your photography website mobile friendly?

Is your photography website mobile friendly? On April the 21st Google is going to make major changes to the way their search engine results are displayed to users searching on mobile devices. The search marketing industry has been frantically trying to prepare for the changes which have been described by Google as having a significant effect on websites in their mobile search results.

What does it mean to you?

The first thing you should do is establish whether your website is mobile friendly or not. To do so please test your website using the free checker provided by Google.

If your website is not classed as mobile friendly by Google you could potentially lose a share of visitors coming to your website via Google search results. To see how much traffic you stand to lose you should check your website traffic tracking statistics. Google Analytics for example allows you to see how many people that visited your website were using a mobile device.

Why should I care?

Like many business websites photographer’s websites are a critical shop window for many who don’t have many ways to gain brand visibility. Mobile usage is growing each year and is now getting to the point where for some websites mobile usage is greater than desktops. If your website isn’t mobile friendly you could be at a disadvantage compared to your competitors before you even begin.

While this only affects mobile traffic at the moment, in the future it is expected to be a factor in Google deciding on the quality of your website on all devices. If your website doesn’t tick as many boxes as your competitor they could win the place above you in the search results, and ultimately your customers.

What can I do?

The best option if you can do it is to have a fully responsive website. This offers the most uniform content to users across a variety of devices and is also the best for SEO. You could also create a separate mobile website but that can bring problems as well as solve them. Google offers guidance on how to make your existing website more mobile friendly here, although this isn’t always practical for some designs.